Other Mwangi Locations

The Mwangi Expanse teems with small nations and clans that each have their own unique culture and traditions. Below are a few more of the Expanse’s most prominent settlements and regions.

Jaha

Unknown architects constructed this massive walled city long before Earthfall. The ruins were a point of fascination for the Lirgeni astrologers who originally came to Jaha after the Eye of Abendego destroyed their homes. Xenophobic and insular, these cultish stargazers traded only reluctantly with outsiders, even other Lirgeni. Two years ago, a coalition of Lirgeni kinfolk and lizardfolk astrologers from the Sodden Lands arrived at Jaha’s gates, ready to force the issue and make the city’s residents share their secrets. To their surprise, however, they found Jaha empty, its occupiers inexplicably absent.

Unnerved but undaunted, the coalition settled into the abandoned ruins, throwing open Jaha’s doors for the first time in generations. Today, adventuring scholars are welcome to help the new residents decipher the city’s many mysteries, particularly the disappearance of the previous Lirgeni occupants. While theories abound, many believe it may have something to do with the strange marker stones erected at various points around the city, or the miles of uncatalogued tunnels beneath its streets.

Mualijae Nations

Once part of a united kingdom, three major nations of Mwangi elves, known collectively as the Mualijae, dwell within the jungles of the Mwangi Expanse. In the west, the militant Ekujae serve as feared and revered guardians of the forest, locked in a decade-long guerrilla war with the Aspis Consortium. In the northwest, the Kallijae have long fought to protect local inhabitants—both elven and otherwise—from the predations of Usaro’s raiding bands. The Alijae of the northern jungles defend the elven ruins of Nagisa, the White City, from those ignorant explorers who would risk unleashing its entrapped evils.

Osibu

Hidden deep in the Screaming Jungle, utopian Osibu is the subject of countless legends—most of them true. Adventurers who make it past the city’s defenses— flora and fauna controlled by a circle of druidic statues called the Twice-Honored Women—find a city paved in gold, its citizens nearly deathless thanks to the magic of their democratically elected leaders. In the city’s center, the great arboreal regent Dimari-Diji has guarded Osibu’s so-called Nemesis Well since before the fall of the Starstone, keeping anyone from entering its unplumbed depths or heeding its sinister whispers. Those who locate the city are greeted warmly, but visitors are not allowed to leave without agreeing to either a geas that binds them to keep the city’s location secret or an herbal concoction that wipes all memory of Osibu’s location from their minds.

Ruins of Kho

The first Shory city to fly, Kho was also the first to fall. In –632 ar, this astonishing marvel of magic and technology came crashing down in a remote valley of the Barrier Wall Mountains, swatted from the sky by the Tarrasque, greatest of Rovagug’s Spawn. Thousands died in the disaster; the survivors abandoned the wreckage of their home and disappeared into the jungles.

Today, Kho is a haunted place, its shattered domes and crumbling cisterns still sputtering and seething with ancient magic. Marids and other outsiders once bound to serve the Shory claim the ruins for their own, battling for supremacy with degenerate morlocks and fell beasts from the surrounding jungles and mountains. Yet despite the danger and the local Mwangi tribes’ refusal to touch the city, the ruins remain a major destination for those explorers willing to make the perilous journey in order to claim the long-lost treasures and forgotten knowledge within the city’s broken spires and half-buried temples.

Sodden Lands

When the permanent hurricane called the Eye of Abendego formed in the wake of Aroden’s death, it catastrophically flooded the coastal nations of Lirgen and Yamasa. Today, the territory is a lawless, storm-wracked swamp stalked by monstrous predators, bloodthirsty boggards, and the aggressive lizardfolk Terwa Lords. Most of its original humanoid population has fled, and those who remain have banded together in gangs of survivalists who scavenge the wreckage. Still, disaster always attracts opportunists, and many adventurers travel to the ruined nations, now called the Sodden Lands, to loot cities lost to the storm. One of the few settlements still occupied is Hyrantam, Lirgen’s former capital, where hundreds of towers built by the ruling Saoc Brethren now form tiny islands above the waves, connected by rope bridges and bedeviled by aberrations lurking beneath the water’s surface.

INNER SEA ASTROLOGY

Many different cultures around the Inner Sea practice astrology—the art of reading portents and signs in the motions of the stars and planets. Less a religion than a science, the practice involves careful study and meticulous record keeping, and while some conventional astronomers denounce the tradition, they can’t argue with the astrologers’ sometimes surprisingly prescient predictions.

The most prominent constellations in Inner Sea astrology are those of the Cosmic Caravan. Astrologers split the night sky into 13 equal longitudinal sections for the 13 signs and use their positions in the sky to learn about both coming events and the traits of people born under them. From the beautiful Thrush to the sinister Follower, these signs are often associated with the Desna-worshipping Varisians or the ill-fated Saoc Brethren of Lirgen.

OSIBU